Saturday, June 17, 2017

How Scotland abolished marriage

In 2006, Scotland changed its laws so that a person who says that he or she lived with someone else can, within a year “after the day on which the cohabitants cease to cohabit.”, go down to the family court and sue for property division and alimony, just as if the two parties had been married. ...

In litigation-oriented societies, I wonder if this Scottish idea will catch on. If the opportunity to litigate is a positive thing for people who were once married, why not for people who once lived together, however briefly?

This is more evidence of the end of marriage.

Some will say that it is pro-marriage, because it recognizes various relationships as if they were marriages, thus inducing more de facto marriages.

Marriage used to mean voluntarily making a deal, and then becoming an autonomous unit. This is putting Scottish couple under the arbitrary supervision of the state. It is the leftist totalitarian state taking over their private lives.

But what happens when a child born abroad to an unmarried couple has one parent who is a U.S. citizen, and one parent who is not? Well, strangely, until today, it all depended whether the foreign parent is the child’s mom or the child’s dad. ...

Under §1409(c), that ten-year requirement is reduced to just one year as long as we’re talking about the year prior to the child’s birth, and as long as we’re talking about the child’s unmarried mother, and not the child’s father. If you’re thinking that this sounds kind of unfair to fathers, you’re definitely getting it.

No, the law was not so strange.

I am all in favor of being fair to fathers, but if the mom is in the USA for the year preceding birth, then the unborn child is also in the USA for 9 months of it. The same cannot be said for the dad. This is a biological reality, and just some arbitrary discrimination.

The article says the vote was 8-0, but it was really only 6-2 in favor of the dicta against the discriminatory law. Under tradition legal interpretation, such an opinion is meaningless, because it did not affect any party to the case. But the court liberals are determined to deny that pregnancy makes women different from men.